Navy Capt. Sean Liedman talks about the search operations Tuesday for Malaysian Air Flight 370. A P-8A Poseidon from Jacksonville Naval Air Station is part of the patrol.

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As part of the search for missing Malaysian Air Flight 370, a P-8A Poseidon from VP-16, a Navy Patrol Squadron from Jacksonville Naval Air Station, is patrolling an area about 1,500 nautical miles southwest of Australia.

“We’ve flown two missions with the P-8 from VP-16 thus far,” said Capt. Sean Liedman, Commodore of Wing 11, the squadron’s parent unit. “They repositioned from [Okinawa], where it’s currently based on deployment, down to Subang, Malaysia, then proceeded to fly a mission in the southern Bay of Bengal.

“Then, just yesterday, the airplane was tasked to reposition to Perth, Australia, to support operations in this new, emerging theory of this southern corridor.”

Search teams are now focusing on waters west of Malaysia in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. However, U.S. officials told the Associated Press the southern part is the most promising. Thus, the southern corridor theory.

At this point, the search area is completely over ocean searching for oil slicks or debris fields, he said.

The search is mostly visual at this point, flown in daytime hours. But the plane is also equipped with sonobuoys that are meant to search out minute sounds from enemy submarines.

“The ping coming out of the black box is not likely to be detected by the sonobuoys,” Liedman said. “But the aircrew is deploying sonobuoys, and one of the advantages there is that they can measure the drift of the current, which would help to refine the search area of any wreckage.”

VP-16 is about halfway through its deployment to the Pacific that began in December. It appears that, at least for the current plane involved in the search, it will be there for the long haul.

“We anticipate they’ll fly one mission a day until the mission is completed or we move on to the next phase of search operations,” he said.

Cmdr. Bill Pennington, commander of VP-16, told the Times-Union in November that “Big Navy” would be watching the unit and how their new planes performed on their first deployment.